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Jobs Previews Displays, Tiger at WWDC
DonaldGelman writes "Apple has just announced a 30-inch Studio Display capable of displaying a resolution of 2560x1600. The display requires a new Nvidia card with 2 parallel DVI connections. The display is going to retail for $3299 in August, and the Nvidia card for around $599." Jobs also announced new 20- and 23-inch displays, for $1299 and $1999 in July. All three feature a new aluminum enclosure, and DVI. Also from WWDC...
Jobs also previewed Tiger, with Spotlight (fast iTunes-like searching in all apps, and systemwide), Dashboard (Konfabulator-like widgets combined with Exposé for fast showing/hiding), Automator (visual AppleScript, combining prewritten actions into scripts), H.264 code for QuickTime (high definition scalable video from MPEG), iChat AV conferencing (up to 10 for audio, four for video), RSS reading in Safari, Core Image and Core Video (realtime filters at the core OS level), and system-wide Sync Services. All of this is extensible (except for iChat conferencing), with SDKs available for developers.
There's a lot here, and a more detailed description is forthcoming. Tiger will be available in the first half of 2005.
Could you give us an SDK for the iPod? We've been very good boys and girls this year, and we promise to be nice with it.
Thank you,
AAiP
P.S.: It'd be really cool if you could make it your "Oh, and one more thing..." We love it when you do that.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Let the copying of Tiger features into Longhorn... begin!
... it's Apple's WorldWide Developer Conference.
The Army reading list
If it's quiet around you, you can probably hear the collective screaming of the Longhorn team from Redmond WA that sounds like "AGHGHGHGHHGHHHHHH!!!!"
"Peter, did you copy all that down?"
"I got only the first half before I fainted. You?"
"I got most of it. Ok, the Longhorn features spec meeting is Wednesday morning, we have two days to put all that new Tiger stuff in!"
For those of you wondering where the pictures on the cinema displays came from it's the Jungfrau Region of Switerland. The valley is the Lauterbrunnen Valley. Now if I could only get the display to go with the picture...
NMG
A nice Safari RSS screenshot, starring our favorite site.
I knew I picked a bad week to not be rich.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
This is a completely Apple-created innovation and is not a rip-off. Oh no. Definitely not.
No, I'm serious. Really. Because despite all the talk of it being a clone of Konfabulator, it appears, in essense, to be Apple's original Desk Accessories brought into the 21st Century. Which is nice.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
These new displays are:
1. Larger
2. Use DVI instead of ADC, so you don't have to have mac hardware to use them.
Not announced on stage, but previewed off, is 10.4 Server: includes 100% 64bit libs, ACLs, iChat server, SUS. Also includes NT migration tool, improved email, and a one-click SOHO setup. Nice bump.
--
$tar -xvf
"You can now host your own iChat server. Instant Messaging serves as a vital means of communication for organizations of all sizes, so it's useful to deploy and run your own private and secure IM server. Based on the open source Jabber project, the new iChat server in Tiger Server lets your company protect its internal communications by defining its own namespace, using SSL/TLS encryption to ensure privacy, and Kerboros for authorization. The iChat server works with both the iChat client in Mac OS X Tiger and popular open source clients available for Windows, Linux and even PDAs."
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/tiger/
This is...
O
U
T
R
A
G
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O
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S
!
"The performance gains and features supported by Core Image ultimately depend on the graphics card. Graphics cards capable of pixel-level programming deliver the best performance. But Core Image automatically scales as appropriate for systems with older graphics cards, for compatibility with any Tiger-compatible Mac."
Apple has just announced a 30-inch Studio Display capable of displaying a resolution of 2560x1600
Jobs also previewed Tiger
There Grrrrrrreaat!
I really hate reading this panic "they're stealing!" attitude every time.
Let's do a review here, okay?"
Frankly, Konfabulator was a low hanging fruit. It didn't really introduce anything except using Javascript, it just tied together a batch of old technology with a very old Apple idea. It's common sense to realize that Apple would move widgets back onto the desktop and add Javascript support once they realized how well it would work out. About the only thing you can really take issue with is Apple's decision to use Javascript.
Hey, check out the Dashboard page here:
On the simulated Dashboard you can have all sorts of nifty mini-programs called Widgets. One of Apple's sample programs is a stock price table, and they're up 7.36 percent. Microsoft is the only stock on the fictional list that's down. Direct link to the image here.
Nice to see Apple's sense of humor. And in fact this sort of functionality is a real smack in the face to Redmond, who have updated little on their desktop (XP) in three years, while Apple has had three release cycles that have been better each time.
Sheesh!
--- Ban humanity.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/safari.html
Also, those who are FIREFLY fans will note the movie is mentioned in the post...
If you look at the calculator in the Dashboard demo, you'll notice it says 1.337!
I love a company with a sexy UNIX based OS and a sense of humor.
They are using Dual-link DVI.
Go to the web page Apple.com
They are using a special NVIDIA card:
" The groundbreaking new NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra delivers the industry's first 16-pipe superscalar architecture and support for the world's fastest DDR3 memory to raise the bar for 3D graphics performance. The specifications of the GeForce 6800 Ultra GPU, are stunning: Using over 220 million transistors it supports a 256-bit interface for an effective memory bandwidth of 35.2 GB per second which delivers 600 million vertices, 6.4 billion textured pixels per second. The GPU is built on an AGP 8X board and includes 256MB of DDR3 memory for use in the most demanding graphics applications. It is the first card available to support the DVI standard dual link digital signal specification from the two DVI ports it features . This capability is required to drive the new 30-inch LCD, high resolution Apple Cinema HD display. The combination of a GeForce 6800 Ultra with a dual processor Power Mac G5 driving two 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Displays is the definitive tool for the creative professional. "
It uses the DVI standard.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room." -President Muffley "Dr. Strangelove"
In Apple's version, the widgets are hidden until the dashboard is activated, at which time they slide to the foreground.
In my opinion, Apple's solution is a lot more elegant, and one I'd actually use. It's a subtle difference, but it's different. I also applaud the addition of the widget launcher... much better than having all widgets running at all times.
The argument is really about whether this is a rebirth of Apple's old Desk Accessory application type or just a ripoff of the Konfabulator widget idea, or some hybrid of the two.
For what? For writing some cool widgets that acess interfaces Apple published allowing for that functionality to be capitalized on by themselves and any one else?
You're acting like this Service is something that would take years of design/development to produce when these add-ons were sitting around Apple Engineering for years as fun experiments for core engineers. How do I know this? When I worked there they had plenty of 'cool' prototype ideas just waiting to be added into the OS. How do you think they are able to always add 150 new features with each new full version?
What's next? Pay everyone who contributed to the development of XML now that Apple is integrating it into their OS? That seems to be a bit more impressive, just like the new MPEG-4, Part 10 Codecs.
I completely disagree - the only thing unique about Konfabulator was the sexy look, and much of that is inspired by OSX itself.
ControlStrip on the classic Mac OS, DesktopX, and many other projects have provided lightweight "applets" in various ways for years. In fact, these are also quite similar to the menu bar applets on OSX, though now liberated from the cramped menu bar.
What are the "rights of small developers"? Which aspect of Konfab is unique in the scope of computing? This reeks of the Watson/Sherlock "controversy", but only in that a developer creates a relatively sexy but not novel UI, and Apple eventually adopts a similar approach to solve the same problems for its users.
It's hard to define where Apple should stop and third-party tools should begin. I see people confusing superficial similarities for innovation being crushed - at what point does Apple stop improving OSX and require its users to buy third-party products?
There will no doubt be others crying about the RSS aggregator, but again these are similar solutions because they are solving the same problems for users. Should Apple just stick to the desktop and the Dock and leave all future goodness to shareware authors?
I love shareware on OSX, I support it religiously, but at some point there has to be an acknowledgement that OS vendors will encroach as user needs are identified. I would love to see Apple develop a grant program or something similar, to honor those developers who lead the way, but I don't think it's an option to just hold back the OS.